Both of tonight's guests are easy-googles, so while much could be written about either of them, I won't bother.
Richard Haass is practically the definition of Establishment, as a look at his tweetstream and a recent NYTimes op-ed will show. One of the 'yeah, but let's not actually burn the barn down' guys.
Here's a sample of Kenneth Goldsmith's wikipedia page:
Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is a Senior Editor of PennSound. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of poetry,...In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first Poet Laureate.
Conceptual Poetics and Poetic Practice
Driven by a preoccupation with “Uncreativity as Creative Practice”, Goldsmith is essentially the habitual editor of one large project, contributing to both the study and practice of poetry as a writer, academic and as curator of the prolific archives at UbuWeb. His process, a series of writing and self-induced constraints has produced 600 pages of rhyming r phrases, sorted by syllables and alphabetized (No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, 1997); everything he said for a week (Soliloquy, 2001); every move his body made during a thirteen-hour period (Fidget, 1999); a year of transcribed weather reports (The Weather, 2005); and one day, the September 1, 2000 issue of The New York Times, transcribed (Day, 2003). The Goldsmith's practice embraces the performance of the writer as process and plagiarism as content...
Academic
As a teacher at University of Pennsylvania, Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing,. Goldsmith’s syllabus includes Uncreative Writing, Interventionist Writing and Writing Through Art and Culture in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Class tools are appropriation, theft, stealing, plundering and sampling. Cheating, fraud and identity theft are all encouraged. For Goldsmith the classroom, is a free space into which ethical queries can be conducted in a safe environment. An in-depth article from Penn's Daily Pennsylvanian discusses Goldsmith's pedagogy. In addition, Goldsmith has also run a graduate seminar at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago entitled "Publishing as Project."
He was awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University during 2010...
And from an NYTimes review of his latest book:
The Words We Heard as Horrors Sank In
‘Seven American Deaths and Disasters’ Transcribes the News
Kenneth Goldsmith is a conceptual poet, a literary trickster whose books are found art of a sort. He mines the mundane.
One of his volumes, “Soliloquy” (2001), consists of every word he spoke for a week. Another, “The Weather” (2005), compiled a year’s worth of weather bulletins from 1010 WINS, the all-news radio station in New York. Yet another, “Day” (2003), is a faithful transcription of each sentence printed in The New York Times on Sept. 1, 2000.
Mr. Goldsmith, who refers to his writing as “mimetic and uncreative,” recently became the first poet laureate appointed by the Museum of Modern Art. There’s a good deal of Andy Warhol in his deadpan attack. His stuff has often been more rewarding to think about than to read.
His potent new book, “Seven American Deaths and Disasters,” takes its title from a series of Warhol paintings. It’s made up entirely of other people’s words, and in many senses it’s like everything he’s done. Yet it’s like nothing he’s done. It knocks the air from your lungs.
To make “Seven American Deaths and Disasters,” Mr. Goldsmith has combed through archival radio and television broadcasts of painful events over the past six decades: there are chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon; the explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger; the shootings at Columbine High School; the attacks at the World Trade Center; and the death of Michael Jackson — and he has transcribed the reports as they unfurled on the air, live and unmediated.
To Mr. Goldsmith’s detractors this may seem like a cheap stunt, a snort of disaster porn. Or it may seem like proof that, in the author’s case, even a blind and snoutless pig will occasionally find a truffle. At times it made me uneasy...
If you're interested in this sort of thing, google will find you lots to read. A few links:
publisher
publisher's weekly review
bookslut review
theawl.com interview
@ubuweb
@kg_ubu (his twitter)
Also for your consideration:
Not sure how John's interview will go, but Stephen's should be entertaining (for certain values of "entertainment".)
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